China Expeditionary Army

The China Expeditionary Army was an army group of the Imperial Japanese Army that was responsible for waging the Second Sino-Japanese War against the Republic of China. At its peak it had over one million troops under its command.

History
It was formed on 12 September 1939 as a merger of the North China Area Army and the Central China Expeditionary Army. The former maintained a separate command in Peking responsible for overseeing operations in the Peking metropolitan area, Inner Mongolia, and other Chinese regions north of the Yellow River. The bolstered former units of the Central China Expeditionary Army, the Sixth Area Army, had the responsibility of fighting in the central and southern China theater, based in Nanking and overseeing a number of independent field armies.

By 1945, the China Expeditionary Army maintained over 25 divisions but remained weak and undermanned from transfers of its resources to the Pacific theater against the United States. It still had enough strength to wage Operation Ichi-Go, a series of offensives in southern and central China against the Chinese National Revolutionary Army in 1944. The CEA was demobilized in August 1945 following Japan's surrender, but individual components often joined the Chinese Nationalists in fighting the Communists in the following year.